Each month in Connecticut, hundreds of people take thousands of water samples, filling out tens of thousands of forms. By the end of each year, there are about a half-million reports.

That's because there are 2,550 water companies for the 169 cities and towns in the state. Some are as small as a well that supplies water to a single restaurant. Some are small community systems -- a well that can serve a handful of houses in a subdivision. Some are municipal or regional water companies that serve tens of thousands of people.

The patchwork system has its problems. Sometimes the small companies can't keep up with what they are required to do.

But despite the anti-regulatory rhetoric that abides in some quarters, all this work means this: Connecticut, by and large, has clean drinking water. One has only to look to West Virginia, where a chemical spill into the Elk River in January polluted the drinking water for about 300,000 people, to see the value of turning on the tap and not worrying about safety.

"We're blessed with very good water resources," said Roger Smith, director of Clean Water Action's Connecticut office. "It's one of the things in Connecticut that we can be proud of."

The drinking water section of the state Department of Public Health, which has a staff of 48 people, is in charge of overseeing the monitoring of the thousands of water companies.

"It's a huge job," said Lori Mathieu, chief of the drinking water section.

The health department hasn't issued its 2013 report yet. But in 2011, it reported 306 violations, with 202 involving higher than allowed levels of coliform bacteria in water. In 2012, it took 299 actions, with 186 involving coliform violations.

"The majority of public water systems with violations are small systems serving populations of less than 1,000 people," the department's report stated. "This is commonly due to financial and managerial inadequacies."

The violations happen at schools, at country clubs, at condominium projects.

In worst-case scenarios, the department can take civil action against violators, fining them as much as $150 a day, Mathieu said.

But, she said, the department's work is focused on getting people back in compliance as quickly as possible.

"We're not out after civil fines," she said. "We're pretty good at convincing water companies to do what they need to do."

`It's all expensive'

Gregory Kallas, owner of the Elmwood Court condominium complex in Bethel, said the state more or less rounded up to include the condominium and its two wells as a community system.

In 2013, Kallas said, his wells tested high for coliform bacteria. He treated them with bleach, following the state regulations, and the wells quickly tested OK.

"I bet if you tested all the wells in Connecticut, you'd find 95 percent of them have coliform," he said. "But the state scares the crap out of people with things like that."

There are also many cases each month of "M&R" -- monitoring and reporting failures.

For example, the department has cited one group of seven homes on a single well on Maple Drive in Monroe several times for failure to file such reports.

But Richard Stein, the owner, said he's looked at the state statutes on the qualifications needed to be a public water system.

"I don't qualify," he said. He's tried to discuss the issue with state health department officials, Stein said, only to be passed from person to person, without any help.

Stein said the public health department has asked him to connect the system to a public water system -- something he can't afford to do. But, he said, complying with state testing regulations was costing him about $2,000 a month, he said.

"It's all expensive," he said.

But, Mathieu said, failure to report is an important issue. Without the reports, she said, the state cannot know if there are violations, and cannot ensure that people are getting safe water to drink.

"It's one of the basic requirements of the Clean Water Act," she said. "It's a basic part of a public water system."

Even when small systems comply, they don't always do so readily.

Richard Freedman, president of Garden Homes, a company that manages mobile home parks in Danbury and New Milford, as well as another in Bethany, said the public health department is requiring him to build water tanks at both the Candle Hill park in New Milford and at the Bethany park because the wells at those sites lacked adequate storage capacity.

"It's costing us $250,000 at each park," he said.

At Garden Homes parks in New York, the state officials allowed the company simply to add generators to the pumps that run the well, rather than building tanks, he said.

"I don't think the water standards in New York are that much different than in Connecticut," he said.

State has strict regulations

But one of the advantages of the state system is that it can pick up problems that might otherwise go undetected.

In New Milford, the town's Health Department has tested 20 residential wells for higher-than-allowable levels of nitrates -- chemicals that often get into a water system that's been used in the past for agriculture. Some of those wells have shown higher-than-acceptable nitrate levels, said Michael Crespan, the town's health director.

Higher-than-normal levels of nitrates are especially dangerous to infants under 6 months old and to pregnant women. They can also cause gastric problems in adults.

Crespan learned about the issue when a public health department test on one building in the area -- the Sunny View day care center on Pickett District Road -- showed high nitrate levels. It alerted the town that a problem might exist in other wells nearby.

Crespan said private well owners can choose to ignore the problem, or get a filtration system for their well.

The day care center is now using only bottled water, said its owner, Alair Dease. It's also installing a filtration system that will take the nitrates out of the water.

The state's involvement in public water has old roots. Mathieu said the state began regulating drinking water in the 19th century.

"In the 1880s, we started passing laws in the state saying keep the animals out of the drinking water, keep the cows out of the drinking water," she said. "Keep them a safe distance from water supplies."

Nancy Alderman, president of Environment and Human Health Inc., also said the state made an early distinction between rivers that were polluted by industrial wastes and rivers used for drinking water, and never mixed the two.

"That's been a big help," Alderman said.

Alderman pointed to the recent disaster in West Virginia as an example.

"They were using that river for drinking water, but they let a chemical plant build nearby," she said.

Mathieu said the state has established protections against such occurrences by limiting human activity in the more than 100,000 acres of public watershed land as much as possible. The department is strict about letting water companies use or sell that land.

"I don't know of any other state in the United States that has these laws," she said. "You go to other states and you find development right up to the edge of a reservoir. You look at it and you can't believe it's a reservoir."

Mathieu also said when the state started requiring cities to build water treatment plants, it made the decision to never allow a water source carrying sewage plant effluent -- no matter how well-treated -- to be used for drinking water. The federal Clean Water Drinking laws passed in 1974, and amended in 1986 and 1996, have made state regulations stronger.

Today, Mathieu said, there are about 2,550 entities in the state that qualify as water companies.

Of these, 550 are classified as community water systems. Some municipal systems and large privately owned water companies each serve tens of thousands of people. There are 122 public well fields, and 150 reservoir systems that feed these larger systems.

There are also 350 small community systems that may serve only a neighborhood or a condominium complex.

There are also 600 facilities that the state classifies as non-transient, non-community water companies. These are places like schools or office buildings that have private wells, but serve the same basic clientele each day.

Finally, there are about 1,400 transient, non-community systems. These are places like restaurants that have a private well, but serve different people every day.

Both community systems and non-transient, non-community systems must either have their own staff to do the testing, or hire a trained person to do it. The state has more than 2,000 certified water operators to do this work.

These companies must file monthly tests. But Mathieu said the large private and municipal companies are testing far more often.

Transient, non-community systems, like those that serve restaurants, can send water to a lab and have the lab send the test results to the state. They also are required to send only quarterly reports.

Private wells unregulated

But there is a significant part of the state that is unregulated. There are about 400,000 private wells in Connecticut, serving about 525,000 people out of the state's 3.5 million residents -- about 15 percent of the population.

The state recommends that these people regularly get their wells tested. But it cannot require them to do so.

And, Alderman said, many people don't want to know if they have problems with their home wells, for fear of having their property values damaged by having an issue with their drinking water.

When Environment and Human Health did a study of pesticides in 53 private wells in the town of Woodbridge in 1998, Alderman said, the only way it could get homeowners to cooperate was to promise total anonymity. (The study found that six of the wells had trace elements of pesticides, and that one well had five different pesticides in its water.)

No public health official is recommending all private wells get tested for water purity issues. With 2,550 water systems to test, they cannot add another 400,000 wells to their list.

So that sector is flying alone.

"I will tell you what I would do if I had a well," Alderman said. "I'd build a charcoal filtration system to it, or at least put a filter on the kitchen faucet where the drinking water comes from."

For, as she points out, and what water companies big and small know: Water moves on its own and the quality can change depending on what it picks up.